Much has been made of how Ed Gillespie somehow managed to win a majority of the white vote on Tuesday.
But wait a minute. Northam won by almost 9 points. How is it possible that he could lose the white vote by 15 and still win the race going away? Well, look at the results by congressional district.
Gillespie’s largest margins were in the two whitest and reddest districts in the state, VA-06 (Roanoke, Lynchburg, Shenandoah Valley) and VA-09 (the New River Valley and coal country). VA-06 is 86 percent white, while VA-09 is 92 percent white. Trump got his biggest numbers in the state in these districts as well. This is a long-winded way of saying that Gillespie ran it up in areas of the state that would vote for a comatose Republican.
As we now know, the key to Northam’s victory was his clean sweep of Northern Virginia. The most telling is that he won VA-10 (Manassas, Prince William, Loudoun, WInchester) going away. And VA-10 is the whitest district in Northern Virginia, at 80 percent white.
In other words, this race looks like a repeat of the 2008 presidential race, in which what looked like a white problem for Obama was really an Appalachia problem. In Virginia’s case, the problem dates back further than the turn of the millennium. The Democrats in western Virginia started splitting their tickets as early as the 1930s, and some parts of this region haven’t supported a Democrat for president since Roosevelt.
It’s even more stark when you look at the county results. Aside from a few pockets of blue (such as Roanoke, Harrisonburg, Blacksburg, Staunton and Martinsville, among others), Northam was almost completely shut out west of Charlottesville and Albemarle County. And in a lot of cases, it wasn’t even close. Unless I’m very wrong, Gillespie carried most of the western counties with well over 60 percent of the vote.
This is a long-winded way of saying that Gillespie ran it up in what is now the Republican heartland of the state. But in the end, it wasn’t enough to make up for a Democratic wave that crashed ashore in Virginia Beach.
Some other takeaways:
- If Barbara Comstock wasn’t a dead woman walking before, she definitely is now. Seven state house seats in her district fell to the Democrats. In much of the Northern Virginia portion of her district, she is now the only elected Republican above the county level. However, if we’re goign to erase the last smudge of red from Northern Virginia’s map, the Democrats need to unite behind a candidate, and quickly. The Repubs are going to throw everything into keeping this seat, and it’s in the enormously expensive Washington market.
- If we haven’t found a candidate in VA-02, we need to find and get behind one there—and now. Northam took VA-02 in part due to winning Virginia Beach, the biggest city entirely within the district. As I’ve said many times, if we can turn Virginia Beach from reddish-purple to bluish-purple, the Republicans will be stretched really thin.
- And it looks like VA-07 is slowly, but surely, shifting out from under the GOP’s feet. This is the second statewide election in a row in which the Republicans have only won by single digits in a district intended to protect the GOP. Eric Cantor probably sat up bolt-upright in his easy chair at the sight that his old district—long a classic affluent Southern Republican suburban district—is now a distinct purple. Do we have a candidate there? If so, it’s time for a money bomb.